


Tether

by lifeinwords



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-14
Updated: 2011-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 09:56:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeinwords/pseuds/lifeinwords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone wants a picket fence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tether

He wants to make it big. His mother knew someone in Gotham who could give him a start, hand him an intern badge for the congressman's office. She cried when he left for Gotham, and his father gave Pete his old briefcase. One of the clasps is broken, but his father's initials still shine above the lock.

He wants air that smells like nothing, not garbage or oil or smoke. Everything here is grimy and old, sharp edges and everything goes by so fast. Pete nearly kills himself on a few crosswalks and falls down on the subway once. He gets lost, caught between homeless people and professionals on cell phones.

The guys from the mailroom call him Petey and look at him like he's something different, something darker and unknown. Everything he says feels like a lie, feels like selling cars but worse. He calls little old ladies and promises them lower taxes, a better tomorrow.

Pete always thought he was good with people, a natural. Paul had said so, but his boss looks at him with squinted eyes, and Pete thinks he must be so small to him, Mr. Speechwriter, speech full of slang and drawl and an invisible straw clenched in his teeth.

He wants to talk to Clark, to be told it'll get better or that Clark's life is even harder. But he doesn't talk to Clark, who apparently doesn't talk to anyone much these days. Chloe emails, frantic rambling messages from one newspaper or another, climbing ladders ruthlessly and loving every second. She's harder now, he can hear it in the words.

***

His father dies eight months into the program, and Pete wants to go home, so he does.  
Packs it in.  
Nobody sends his stuff or asks him back. He thinks they've probably already forgotten his name, thrown away his family photo and the plastic gremlin figure Clark had given him for luck.

The sky is so blue when he steps out of the truck.  
Paul had driven him the three hours in near-silence, blasting AC-DC and the Allman Brothers too loud to even hear the wind through the open windows.  
His mother is outside, crying, and he's in her arms before he takes a full breath.  
Everything goes very slowly for a while.

He wants to make it better. He wants to stop seeing his mother rocking on their front porch, hands lost in her father's old cardigans.  
The store is about to go under, unless someone takes charge.

***

Pete goes to work every day, briefcase dusty under his childhood bed.  
He stamps the invoices.  
Restocks on Tuesdays.  
On Thursdays Mr. Haynes comes in. They talk about irrigation and the new Wal-Mart on the edge of town.  
He always has a smile for his customers, apron blue and freshly starched.  
He likes how his face and arms shine with sweat when he hauls the bags of feed inside every Friday.

Deliveries, receipts, inventory, order. His name shines in brass on the door, right under his father's. It feels like he's still there, scratching out mistakes in the account book. Pete uses the same red pen and stays late into the night to read his father's notes in the margins.

***

The coffee is still running hot and bitter at the Talon. Pete drinks it while Lana opens up, taking down chairs and watering the plants.

Nell had gotten enough money in the divorce settlement to buy the Talon and a dress shop across the street. They were doing okay.  
Lana had a horse, and she took Pete riding even though he didn't know how, let him jostle next to her through the woods every Saturday.  
She didn't talk to him much.

He wants to talk about it. Paul's back in school, and his mother feeds him every time his voice catches on the name.  
Lana lets him cry in a dark corner booth, and she hands him napkins while he chokes everything out. Sometimes she holds him and whispers things he can never quite hear.

***

Lana gets the flu in May. She's out for two weeks. She looks pale when he visits, so Pete stays. He brings her blankets and tea and wonders.  
He'd never seen how small she was, how soft--she was Clark's dream girl, always, a frustrating figure in the distance that Pete'd never looked at too closely.

He reads to her on the porch swing of their old-new house, e.e. Cummings and Frost and Browning.  
She says he has a wonderful reading voice.  
He finds his hands stroking through her hair one night as she falls asleep on his shoulder, words about apple trees and snow falling in fields dying away.  
They have long conversations about the past and the future.  
What they wanted, what they dreamed.

Lana had always wanted to leave, but now she's changed her mind.  
She says she admires him for making the store work. For making something that lasts.  
She asks him to help her plant a garden in the spring.  
She asks him why he came back, and he tells her the truth.

They kiss the next night, and her mouth is so sweet. He falls into it, thinks 'home.'

***

They don't talk about Clark or Chloe or anything both of them remember. They talk about the future, about sewing circles and poker nights and what color to paint the kitchen when they move into that abandoned house on Jewell Avenue.  
They make plans.

He thinks of Chloe once during sex, even though he doesn't mean to and hates himself afterward.

That weekend she'd flown in to visit unexpectedly.  
He had picked her up at the airport and kissed her the whole way to his apartment, ignoring the smells and burned out hallway lights and roach motels for his futon on the floor.  
They hadn't left the bed for two days, drunk and wild.  
She'd bitten jagged circles over his arms, and he'd licked and sucked at her clit until she'd screamed and woken the neighbors.  
She left without a word.  
They'd wasted them all stumbling around the fact that Chloe belonged there and he didn't, that she needed skyscrapers and he wanted dirt roads.

***

But when he opens his eyes it's still Lana, soft and quiet and he falls into her every time.  
Under her, breathing in her hair until it's all he can taste.

She's so earnest.  
She looks at him like every nail in her new desk is a promise.  
He turns queasy under it, sometimes. Every time she raises her eyes and asks for anything, he wants to bend steel and be unbendable, all at once.

She needs him. Pete. She needs help, his strength, what he knows and what he can do.

He builds her a china hutch. She makes him a quilt with their names intertwined.

She asks him to pick her up from work, on foot in the spring and in the car when it rains that fall. She asks him to come in on Sunday to replace the blinds.  
She asks him to bring flowers for dinner with Nell.  
She asks him to carry her bags when they go shopping.  
She asks him to let her in, tell her what he's thinking when he stops frozen in Tillman's Grocery Store, between the hot dogs and the cheese.

***

He misses Clark. He wants to, just once more, go swimming and have a day that feels like a second, like eternity, lying damp and full in the summer grass.

He wants to be twelve.

He wants to be a man, to take his wife's arm and lead her anywhere.

Pete wants to be honest with himself. He was afraid, he knows that now. He wasn't ready, didn't--it was too big for him.  
Too much.  
And if sometimes he wants to scream until the glass in his office shatters, if sometimes he wakes up gasping for breath, Lana wants to go to Maui for the honeymoon. It's worth it.  
She needs him, and Pete feels so strong when he holds her.  
His mother smiles when Lana brings her lemonade, and they talk about how to prune apple trees while Paul winks at Pete across the table.

***

She doesn't cry when he asks her. She tugs him up from his knees instead and spins him around, laughing. Pete gets dizzy and almost falls down, laughing himself in wonder.  
This is the biggest thing he's ever done.

They want to be married at twenty, and their colors are powder blue and light pink.  
The house will be done just in time.  
Lana keeps debating whether they should have a cat or a dog, and Pete's heart feels so full when he says, why not have both?  
They're ready, he thinks. He'll always be there, fixing the sink and rocking the baby, and she'll smell like perfume when she welcomes him home.

Pete thinks about their children, and that maybe his first son will wonder why his father came back to Smallville, chose to run a feed and farm tool store.  
He could have been a congressman, Lana says so.  
She would have been a society wife, would have stood by his side no matter where he wanted to go.  
But he wants safe. Small. This is their home.

Maybe his son will want to leave, want to go to Gotham or Metropolis and try himself against the world. Maybe he'll be embarrassed at his father in his blue apron, who doesn't want more than cherry pie when he gets home for dinner promptly at six.

His son just wouldn't understand, that's all. He wouldn't understand.

The night before the wedding, they went to the graveyard and promised not to forget.  
To bring flowers every year and remember the people their parents wanted them to be.

He promises her a white picket fence.


End file.
